114 PYRRHUS AT ASCULUM.

Roman armies. He had tasted the quality of Eoman valor
and found it unsafe to run too great a risk. His march on
Rome had manifestly "been an error. Negotiations ensued,
the senate listened, but Rome held firm for war.

Pyrrhus' next encounter was near Asculum (Ascoli) in
Apulia, on the river now called Torrente Carapella, with the
armies of the consuls Decius and Sulpicius. The king was
aiming to cross the mountains by way of Beneventuin,
when the consuls headed him off. Each side had some
seventy thousand men, of which in the Roman army twenty
thousand were Roman citizens and eight thousand cavalry;
in the king's army sixteen thousand were Greeks and Epirots
and eight thousand cavalry. The balance was made up of
allies. The Epirot and Greek infantry was in the centre of
Pyrrhus' line, in a solid phalanx; Ms allies he set up, in imi-
tation of the Romans, in manipular order, so as to extend his
front, which, at Heracles, had been dangerously outflanked.
It -nnast be remembered that the phalangial formation took
up per thousand men a front much less than half that of the
legionary.

The Romans had apparently again established their camp
on the farther side of the river, intending to cross it to attack
the king,, and to use it as a ditch to their camp. The river
flows through a narrow alluvial valley, with hills of five to
seven hundred feet on either bank, and rising on the south to
the dignity of mountains. Asculuni lay on a plateau some
thirteen hundred feet above the sea. The ground along the
river was swampy, treacherous and much cut up by woods.
The Romans crossed the stream and attacked the king on
the rolling ground to the east.

The swampy condition of part of the ground delayed Pyr-
rhus in getting his elephants into line, while the wooded andr deemedand killed. But the smaller